Notoriously placid these days, Switzerland nonetheless spent the first five hundred years of its existence
rent by conflict, and fought a civil war as recently as 1847.
Switzerland was inhabited by a Celtic tribe called
Helvetia in the ancient times. It became a part of the Holy Roman Empire in AD 1032 but soon
succumbed to the mighty Habsburgs of Germany. The Swiss Confederation (abbreviated in Latin to "CH")
dates back to 1291, when Alpine peasants formed an alliance to defend themselves against the Hapsburgs following the
death of the Habsburg ruler Rudolf I.
By the early 1500s,
the Confederation had grown into a military superpower feared throughout Europe. Switzerland was declared a neutral state
following the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 and was accorded permanent neutrality in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna. A new
federal constitution came into force in 1848 and Bern became the capital city. It was only
with the Reformation that the
Swiss began to earn their reputation for neutrality, a reputation which served them well right through into the boom years
after World War II.
In the 1990s, the country's image was tainted, as exposs uncovered Swiss banks' dubious wartime
collusion with the Nazis. Public soul-searching in the aftermath of the scandal is heralding Switzerland's first tentative
steps towards ending its dogged isolation and joining the EU and the UN.
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